by Colin Meloy
CHAPTER 16
Under Wildwood
To Curtis, it looked like a coiled snake. Prue disagreed; she said it seemed aboriginal. Curtis had asked what “aboriginal” meant, and Prue said it had something to do with Australia. The native people there. Curtis replied curtly that he knew what aboriginal meant but he just wondered what on earth something aboriginal would be doing in the middle of the Pacific Northwest, to which Prue responded that there were a lot stranger things happening around them—a lot stranger—and that she’d given up trying to piece together how and why things occurred in this place. Curtis didn’t have a response to this observation. One thing was certain: The design that had been engraved on the keystone of the tunnel’s tall archway had undoubtedly been made by somebody.
“I’m getting a real ‘snakes ahead’ vibe from it,” suggested Septimus, shivering.
The design was a simple coil, carved into the rock. Below the archway, a tunnel, perhaps the height of two very tall men, extended beyond sight into darkness.
“I’m not sure,” answered Prue. “Seems to me like these sorts of things mean, like, the circle of life. Stuff like that.”
“Wonder who made it,” mused Curtis.
“Probably can keep wondering. Looks like it’s been here a long time, whoever carved it,” said Prue.
“At least we know somebody got down here. There must be a way to the surface.” Curtis, by the light of the lantern, had taken his socks off and was busy wringing the icy cold water from them.
“Sure,” said Prue. “But given the choice, is that where we want to be right now?”
Curtis regarded his friend coolly. “You may be right.”
“Even if Darla didn’t survive the fall, who knows if there are more of them, these foxes, out there. Not quite sure how we’re going to find the makers and get Alexei reanimated, down here.”
“That’s still the goal, huh?”
“Of course it’s still the goal,” said Prue.
Curtis shared a glance with Septimus before saying, “What about the bandits? We need to find out what happened to them.” Little rivulets of water were pouring from the fabric of his socks; his bare feet were the color and texture of one of the jarred pig fetuses that had lined the shelves of their Life Science lab room.
“Also,” added Septimus, “we did almost die. Twice. Sometimes that can, you know, rejigger priorities.”
“Twice?” asked Curtis.
“I’m counting the fox-woman attack as one. Then the fall.”
“Got it,” said Curtis, before adding, “Though I tend to think the whole episode was one big death-avoidance thing.”
Prue, annoyed, rounded on them both. “Well, it hasn’t. Rejiggered priorities,” she said.
“The whole camp was wiped out, Prue,” said Curtis. “It’s sort of a miracle that we survived the fall. I mean, for all I know, Septimus and I are the last remaining Wildwood Bandits. We owe it to the rest of the band to find out what happened.”
Prue seemed like she was prepared for Curtis’s objection. “I have a really good hunch that the tree knew about this all along. I’m thinking that, somehow, reanimating Alexei will go a long way to helping everyone. Including the bandits. I mean, think about it. We fall into the Long Gap—that certainly wasn’t part of our plan—and we wind up finding this tunnel—that boy had said to me, ‘You have to go under to get above.’ I swear. I’m totally quoting him there.”
“So you said.”
“And the tree—or the boy—also said that we needed to reanimate the true heir to save our lives and our friends’ lives. However that works, I think the meaning’s pretty clear. This is what we have to do.”
“You’re the oracle here. You’re the one with the voices in her head.”
Prue ignored this little slight. She was dragging her fingers through her hair, squeezing water from the damp strands, and thinking. “It’s just that it’s not entirely clear how we go about it, being underground. I mean, clearly it’s going to be hard to do what the tree wants us to do in our, you know, present circumstances. South Wood’s a far way away. And who knows how many of those assassins are out there. One thing is certain: We’re safest down here, out of sight, in the underground.”
“Or aboveground,” said Curtis. A light had come over his face. “Hear me out: If things are really as they are in South Wood, everyone thrown into a patriotic tizzy over this and that, and we know that somebody with a horse in that race is wanting us killed—don’t you suppose that being out in the open might be safer than hanging out in some anonymous hole where we could be dispatched without anyone knowing it? I mean, I know I’ve joked about it, but you’re the Bicycle Maiden. You’re, like, the mascot of the revolution. I mean, who knows, right? You show up and everybody might be bending over backward to please you and make sure you’re—and hopefully, me too—safe.”
“And that’s how we get to Alexei, and start looking for the makers,” said Prue.
“We’ve got to tell them what’s happened to us, to the bandits,” Curtis added. “Someone’s got to help.”
Septimus interjected, “Don’t we still have an emissary there? Brendan sent Angus not too long ago. He’s got to still be there.”
Prue nodded. “Maybe that is the best course.” She paused and stared at the lichen-covered walls of the chamber, their greenness an almost neon in the lantern’s light. The void beyond the archway was chilling to her. “Assuming we can even get out of here. It’s just as likely this tunnel will just lead to a dead end somewhere. Though—I do remember …” Here, she began chewing on a nagging fingernail, trying to conjure a memory from the previous autumn. “Penny, the housemaid at the Mansion. When she snuck me out of there, when I went to meet Owl Rex, she took me through these crazy tunnels. I think she said something about them being there before the Mansion had even been built. Maybe they extend all over the Wood!”
“Maybe so.” Curtis, having wrung as much water from his wool socks as he could manage, cringed as he rolled them back onto his feet. When he was done, he slipped his boots back on and stood gingerly. He made little sloshing noises as he shifted from one foot to the other.
“Close enough,” he said. “You guys good to go?”
Prue tested her bad ankle with a few steps. “I think so,” she said.
“You two first,” said the rat. “You can soak up all the snakes.” Curtis waved the way for Prue; together they crossed through the archway and into the tunnel.
The dampness seemed to engulf them. Even if their clothes weren’t already drenched to the skin, they would’ve felt the air, thick with moisture, closing in around them. Thankfully, it had grown warmer as they traveled farther into the tunnel, which went a long way toward making their slow progress at least somewhat comfortable. Prue had to walk carefully, her ankle still smarting from the fall. The walls of the tunnel climbed high above their heads to arrive at its arched spine, aloft at the height of a basketball backboard. The stones that made up the wall looked as if they’d been meticulously chiseled into usable form by hand, with the aid of some archaic tool. Prue wondered what sort of hands would’ve done this work: The amount of time it would’ve taken to do even a small section of the tunnel seemed unfathomable to her. She imagined the creatures, animal and human, working together over centuries to craft this single artery, so deep in the underground, the chamber echoing with the sounds of their work, with the sounds of their songs.
Curtis, meanwhile, took up the rear with Septimus, looking behind him every now and then to make sure the inevitable serpent the rat kept going on about wasn’t mounting a rear attack. James Earl Jones horribly transforming into a giant, toothy snake in the original Conan movie was branded on his brain, ever since he’d watched it with his dad when he was younger. He wondered if he’d be that creeped out, though, if whatever specter he imagined arriving was, in fact, James Earl Jones, who came crawling up behind them and transformed himself into a poisonous reptile; Curtis thought that that might be cool. Espec
ially if he talked, because then you could hear James Earl Jones’s voice in real life. And before he knew it, Curtis was mumbling something aloud in his best James Earl Jones voice.
“You have failed me for the last time, Admiral,” he said.
“What?” asked Prue, stopping in her tracks.
“Did I say that? Sorry.” He realized his mind had been wandering, though the natural reverb of the tunnel did lend a kind of authenticity to his impression.
“Come on, I think I see something ahead,” said Prue.
The tunnel hit a T intersection, some thirty feet from where they stood. A little stream of water dribbled from a hole in the masonry. Another stone had been set into the endless repetition of gray rock: the now familiar coiled circle. Below it, the designers of the tunnel had set two decorated stones, faded with time, next to each other. A circle was carved into one; a triangle in the other. Prue and Curtis studied these stones for a time, each alternately stepping forward and wiping the accumulated mud from the stones’ engravings.
“I’m thinking triangle,” said Curtis. “Though circle is awfully tempting as well.”
Prue was silent. She held the lantern out and studied both of the options; each direction from the junction looked identical.
“Don’t suppose the circle means bathroom, do you?” asked Curtis. “I should’ve gone in that pool, but it was just too cold.”
“You’re in an abandoned tunnel system,” said Septimus, having caught up. “I think it’s safe to say the world is your commode.”
Without speaking, Prue turned left and began following the “circle” artery. Curtis followed, Septimus astride his epaulet.
“What’d you do there?” asked Curtis.
“Just following a hunch,” replied Prue.
They came to several more such intersections; and with each one, it became increasingly arbitrary which direction they chose. A few times they found themselves dead-ended in a chamber similar to the one into which they’d fallen; in such cases, they simply turned around and chose the other direction. Since they didn’t really have a viable entryway—they’d fallen through a makeshift tunnel that itself had led from the bottom of an unscalable shaft—Prue had reasoned that it didn’t really matter which direction they went or that they kept track of their steps. She’d said this much to Curtis and Septimus while they were sitting at an intersection, sharing another piece of jerky. The unspoken subtext there, Curtis decided, was that they were basically marching until they ran out of food and starved to death or found an exit to the surface—whichever came first. It was enough to send shivers up his spine.
They continued on; finally, after several hours of wandering the maze, they saw that the walls of the tunnel seemed to fall away, and a cool, empty breeze suddenly passed over them. Holding out the lantern, they saw that they had entered a massive chamber, for which there was no visible ceiling or floor, and the stone path they were walking on was, in fact, a bridge to the other side. To their dismay, the light of the lantern revealed a dizzying crisscross of identical bridges, spanning the chasm directly below them; the scene repeated above them as well. It reminded Curtis of the videos he’d seen at the local science museum: the vast linking tendrils of tissue that made up the human brain.
“Oh man,” Curtis heard Septimus say at his shoulder.
“Just …,” began Prue. She was sounding desperate, afraid. “Let’s just keep going.”
As if to underscore the seriousness of their situation, Curtis’s stomach let out a little hungry grumble. “Ignore that,” he said.
They crossed the bridge. In time, they came to another split in the tunnel; both sides led to short flights of stairs. They took the one to the left. It split twice more before they found themselves again crossing a massive chasm, spanned by a multitude of other bridges above and below them. It was impossible to know where they were in relation to their previous position—or, really, whether this was the same chasm they’d traversed just a short time before. Prue’s limping was becoming more pronounced. “Let’s stop,” suggested Curtis. “You look like you’re in pain.”
Prue ignored him and kept moving, blindly following the myriad pathways of the tunnel system. “There has to be a way,” he heard her whisper.
They climbed stairways that seemed to get more and more vertical as they went, until they found themselves scaling the footholds of the stone wall the staircase had inexplicably become; they followed bridges that narrowed, at points, to barely the width of a single step. They wandered tunnels that seemed to curve, looping, impossibly in on themselves; tunnels that were fashioned for the easy passage of mutant-tall giants but then would end abruptly in a short doorway, leading on to passageways that they would have to follow on their hands and knees. A great, spiraling stairway led them down the wall of a massive cylinder-shaped chamber, at the bottom of which was a broken ladder, leading farther into blackness below them. At one point, at the crown of an arched bridge, they stopped and ate. Curtis, while munching on the last of his apple slices, saw Prue nod off into slumber. Pushing himself against her, he too fell into a deep sleep. Septimus prodded them both awake some time later, though it was impossible to know how long they’d been out; in this dark underworld, the passage of time seemed irrelevant.
They checked their remaining rations; they had perhaps another day’s worth of sustenance. Curtis massaged his temples with his fingers. The idea that they would perish in this underground labyrinth was steadily becoming more of a likely outcome. How had he been drawn so far astray from his bandit cohorts? He was sure there was something in the oath, the one he’d taken that night at the strange altar in the woods, that insisted on you sticking with your fellow bandits. Not leaving their side—or something to that effect. He’d only been a bandit for a few months and already he’d failed them. Brendan, Aisling—all of them. His family.
He stopped there. What family? That wasn’t his family; Prue had been right. His real family, he’d already left. What was his father doing now? His mother? He imagined his two sisters, going through their daily routine without a thought to the dire circumstances he presently found himself in. He scarcely had time to recollect the never-ending chirping of his younger sister’s Intrepid Tina doll before he saw Prue’s hand waving in his face. She was standing in front of him. Her face was flat, unemotional.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”
They hadn’t traveled far—perhaps an hour or two—before Prue stopped abruptly. Curtis nearly ran into her back.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Shhh. Listen.”
Curtis held his breath; the omnipresent drip, drip from the lichen was the only thing he heard.
“I don’t hear any—”
“Shhh—there it goes again!” Prue had her finger to her mouth and was holding the lantern high.
Curtis again screwed up all his listening prowess; this time, he heard something, something other than dripping. “What is that?” It sounded like metal dragging over stone—but something small, like a key being slid along a brick wall. In the cavity of the tunnels, the sound took on a terrifyingly ominous aspect.
Prue didn’t answer; she was too busy staring at the space in front of them. They’d just turned at a Y intersection, taking the left passageway, and were in the middle of one of the longer stretches of tunnels they’d been through. The sound seemed to be coming from the darkness ahead of them.
The lantern cast a dim light on the ground ahead; Curtis envisioned some eldritch creature, all tentacles and glistening eyeballs, carrying a—what?—an ax, maybe. Dragging on the ground. He shivered at the image. There was a nagging tug at his ear; Septimus had winnowed his claws into Curtis’s earlobe and was holding on to it like a child squeezing a teddy bear. “Snake,” he whispered. “I’d know that sound anywhere.”
“Hello?” called Prue.
The sound stopped.
Prue thrust the lantern out farther, edging forward down the tunnel as she did.
&n
bsp; A voice came from the deep black. “WHO GOES THERE?” it said. It didn’t sound like any voice Curtis had ever heard; it sounded as if it’d been buried underground for centuries, deprived of the warming rays of the sun—if a voice could sound like such a thing. It was dark and pitched low; menacing.
The voice sounded again, echoing off the walls of the tunnel. “TRESPASSERS OF THE UNDERWOOD, STATE YOUR NAME AND BUSINESS. IF YOU BE AGENTS OF DENNIS, I WILL BE FORCED TO DECAPITATE YOU.”
Septimus gave a terrified yelp before jumping from Curtis’s coat and scurrying away down the passageway in the direction they’d just come. Curtis grabbed hold of Prue’s shoulder, hard; to his mind, this was far worse than snake-transformed James Earl Jones appearing from the dark—at least that would be a known quantity. Rather, this thing seemed to be coming from the very core of the earth itself, its being having been forged in the crucible of the molten depths.
The metallic noise sounded again, this time as if it were right at their feet. Prue swung the lantern about them, trying to gauge where the sound was coming from. “Where is it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know!” Curtis whispered back, shaking.
The voice gave an audible gasp. It sounded like it was coming from their feet. Prue let the lantern drop a little, lighting the floor. There, standing directly in front of them, was a small, furry mole.
Curtis’s face fell. “Did you say that stuff?” he asked.
The mole, all of three inches tall, was aiming his snout in their direction. He wore, strangely enough, a kind of suit of armor that looked to be fashioned out of old bottle caps. A sword hung at a belt around his diminutive waist. Except it was not so much a sword as it was a standard Walgreens-issue darning needle. “HEAVENLY CONFUSION!” he cried in his weird, plaintive voice. “OVERDWELLERS!”
